J.D. Smith was awarded a 2007 Fellowship in Poetry from the United States National Endowment for the Arts. He has published two collections of poetry: The Hypothetical Landscape and Settling for Beauty. His poetry has received three Pushcart nominations, while his essays and reviews have appeared in American Book Review, Grist and Pleiades.

Smith’s newly published children’s book, The Best Mariachi in the World, is a bilingual (English/Spanish) embedded text picture book that incorporates cultural tradition, wishes, and finding happiness.

The following poems and essay excerpt are previously published, and are featured here with the author’s permission. An interview with J.D. Smith will appear Friday, 11/14 on the blog. Visit his website to read more of his work.

Elegy

Dusk. The plangent geese migrate.
Ragged chevrons that used to bisect a continent
now settle near a golf course and the retaining pond
of an office park, small oxymoron
inside the larger, land development.
The flocks will rest in head-tucked clusters,
low, transient monoliths, like modest gods
left by a miniature people.

Still, the land-crossing cry
persists as if to close
not a day, but a season,
and mark its loss
with a portion of the brokenness
that informs the haiku’s heart
and the weightless bone, somewhere in my heart,
that is struck and softened
by the sentimental string arrangement
that bathes the climax
of a made-for-TV film
about the latest disease
or another private distress
raised to a social issue, if not elevated:
all is forgiven, by everyone, at death’s door.
Inevitably as that death,
the notes well up, break forth,
and with them my tears.

Pendejo que soy!
The small tide breaks
against my reason.
Pendejo que soy!
The small tide breaks
against my reason.
Literally, in Spanish,
what a pubic hair, meaning fool, I am.
Even my confession is reduced.
In Latin Augustine cried Mea saura!
Literally, what a lizard I am,
Meaning the serpent’s cousin,
and hardly less intimate
with the foot-hardened ground.
Mea maxima saura!
What a great lizard I am,
shouted across the gulf
between perdition and salvation,
showing the passage that awaits
those who can summon
such heights and depths.

From my depths, I’ve summoned
a spiral thread of hair, less than
what I could have called myself,
without affecting a second language:
asshole.

Others might.
I should welcome a promotion to simple flesh,
untroubled by distant sounds that weaken
and arrive to no effect, no more than
an earthquake on another continent disturbs
an office park’s builders, or their earnings.
I could look past the short flights
now joined to the landscape
like sparrows, or a soybean field.

(published in Innisfree Poetry Journal, Issue 1)

Bout

I punch a gray wall
and break nothing.

The bones of my fingers
have not cracked,
their skin is not scraped.

We can spar like this for hours
until, bored with me,
the low fog burns away.

(published in right hand pointing)

Coitus

It is only flesh,
More or less the same compendium

Of water, laced
With carbon and trace minerals,

That makes up a bison’s leg,
The pork on a plate.

It is only flesh
Meeting more of the same,

The means for a double helix
To spiral through time.

It is simply flesh
In an aroused state,

Soon satisfied,
Made a vessel

Of attachment, of regret, infused—
afflicted—by what some call a spirit,

Whose noted powers
Do not include taking back

The entanglement of flesh with other flesh,
Now complex as a molecule.

(from Settling for Beauty, by Cherry Grove Collections)


An Immodest Proposal (excerpt)

How a little blue pill could get big results — in species conservation, we mean

Quick: what do sea turtles, black bears, and Philippine fruit bats have in common? At first glance, not much. They don’t look alike, and they have very different ranges and habitats. In fact, one would be hard-pressed even to find them on any of the same guest lists.

But these creatures share one very important trait. Along with seahorses, rhinoceroses, and macaques, they are all hunted, sold, and consumed for use in potions and dishes with alleged “aphrodisiacal properties.” For men. And I think we know what that means.

In a more perfect world, we men might be willing to age gracefully and hang up — well, whatever it is we hang up, say, spurs — and retire from certain pleasures of the flesh. When that happens, though, men will be too distracted to care. We’ll be busy watching pigs fly.

Until that day arrives, there will be a market for products that enhance “male performance” (presumably not in rugby). In Asia and Central America, among other places, this means resorting to traditional, animal-based remedies. Two tragedies can result. The first is personal: they may not work. The second is even, ahem, greater: threatened species are being hunted to extinction, with untold consequences for ecosystems and economies.

As experts in international development know, however, this is generally not a matter of good guys and bad guys, black hats and white. Poachers, often poor and uneducated, are simply trying to make a living by meeting a demand. If the market for their contraband product dries up, or if alternative livelihoods are available, they might well find other work.

Of course, this is easier said than done. Behavior and culture take time to change, and there is no silver bullet. There is, however, a little blue pill.

Yupper. That one. Sildenafil citrate, though no one calls it that. It is currently sold by Pfizer (in which I have no stock) under the name of Viagra, but even after the patent expires the name seems likely to remain in the language, like Kleenex or Xerox, as the term for a whole product category and not just one brand.

Of course, there are now other products for the treatment of erectile dysfunction, which goes by the friendly acronym ED. (This sounds like someone you might play poker with once a week.) Treatments for our pal ED now include Bayer and GlaxoSmithKline’s Levitra (vardenafil hydrochloride), a brand name derived from the Latin root of the verb “to raise,” and ICOS and Eli Lilly’s Cialis (tadalafil), which sounds like an MTV VJ from the late 1980s. More brands are forthcoming and, as with Viagra, after the patent period expires, the eventual generic market for these drugs is expected to be sizeable.

The implication is clear. If we want to save black bears and rhinos, we have to get these drugs into the hands of the people who would otherwise be paying for those animals’ parts or doing the hunting for themselves.

(Read the entire article from the March 22, 2005 issue of Grist online.)

I sat across from John Morrison in a poetry workshop a few years ago and couldn’t figure what he was doing there, certain, after a brief conversation, that he should have been teaching a workshop of his own. He was well on his way to doing that and plenty more. By then he’d already earned his MFA from the University of Alabama. A year after the workshop, he’d receive the C. Hamilton Bailey Poetry Fellowship from Portland-based Literary Arts. In 2007, Bedbug Press published his first full-length collection, Heaven of the Moment, which is a finalist for the 2008 Oregon Book Award in poetry. John and I got together recently at the Star E. Rose cafe to talk writing, teaching and process.

DJ: I’d like to start by reading something out of Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town, which is a book I know you’ve used in some of your classes. Hugo writes in his opening: “You’ll never be a poet until you realize that everything I say today and this quarter is wrong. It may be right for me, but it is wrong for you. Every moment I am, without wanting or trying to, telling you to write like me. But I hope you learn to write like you. In a sense I hope I don’t teach you how to write but how to teach yourself how to write.”

Do you catch yourself, or have you caught yourself doing this, and what’s your process to move away from that place where we’re inadvertently teaching others to write like us?

JM: I think, to some degree, workshops are a sham. We enter into them in a charlatan-like fashion. I do explicitly tell my students, “I can only teach you to write like me.” Which, I think, gives them the freedom to do what Hugo says next, which is, “Keep your crap detector on.” If it’s not working for you, then back off. Also, it’s important for a teacher to go, “I can be wrong about this.” You don’t want students to do something because you tell them to. You want them to do something, read something, think something, try a different line, try a different ending, because they want to. They have to choose it. They’re not going to choose it if it’s simply my idea.

I’m afraid this is a little bit of a cop out, but I am big on telling my students I’m not teaching them to write the poems they’re working on right now. I’m teaching them to work on the poems they will have in a year, if they stay with it.

I have drafts, and I know what I love about this first rough thing that I’ve written, but I know it’s not done for literally a year. Some can come sooner than that, but it can be literally be a year, because I have so many poems going at once, and what I don’t want to do is get to the point where I’m rushing a poem. Once I rush a poem, I freeze it in a certain place. If I take my time with it, it has the time and the process to become what it wouldn’t in its own time.

That’s why when somebody goes, “Just tell me how to fix this poem,” all I can do is say what I’d do. You can send it off and see if somebody wants to take it. But I’m really not teaching you to work on this poem in front of you right now. Whatever I tell you that’s worthwhile will be there when you’re drafting a new poem in six-months, or when you’re finishing that new poem six-months after that.

DJ: Another thing Hugo talks about, and I’d like to move into your process when you’re on the page with this, is the triggering topic, or the triggering subject, allowing yourself to move free of that trigger and go where the poem takes you. In many of your poems, you prove very fluent at this. A number of them meander in this very fluid way that never feels forced, and I never feel lost. The poem takes me where I wasn’t expecting it to go at the start. The picture develops in a panoramic sense. You start here, everything stays within the frame but the borders continue to expand. Do you ever find yourself fighting to keep the poem going in something of a straight line, and how do you safeguard against expectations to allow the poem to take you where it’s going to go?

JM: That’s a difficult question because I don’t watch myself like that. I really honor what Hugo says about triggering towns, but I don’t understand it. I really love what Robert Bly says about leaping poetry, or what frenetic stuff experimental writers can get into, but I might be a little more dull than all of that. (Laughs)

DJ: OK. For instance then, in “My Neighbor’s Dog,” I read the start as a scene poem between you and the neighbor. I get a feeling for that relationship. The poem then transforms into this wonderful play of language, off the word “being,” which is the name of the dog. Then you have all those meanings a reader could throw at “being,” which you’ve connected with through the manifestation of this dog. Then the last stanza takes this almost melancholic turn where it becomes this bit of wisdom that’s being passed from father to son. I could not have anticipated this poem that began as this scene poem would have ended there. So to distill the previous question, at what point does the poem take over and you step aside?

JM: You’ve gotten it in the play of that language. Once I followed that thread, and trusted stuff that for a long time wasn’t en vogue, which is a lot of repetition. Keep hammering on a word until it takes different shape, which is what we do every day in language. Typically, the more you say a word the more it changes, the more it has a life.

There’s some real life, which is foolish, but real life in that first stanza. And in fact, I had a professor of philosophy who joked about naming his dog Being. He was a sympathetic character, but not all that likable a character. He was kind of nasty character. And I’ve never much liked Lewis Finch either – I just kind of got along with Lewis Finch – who appears as a boy in the poem.

DJ: Is that someone…

JM: From my childhood.

DJ: So he’s always a child?

JM: If you take…I don’t even know if I had a son when I started writing that poem. But you look back at me as a college student with this professor who’s now an adult with me. And I have a son, though I don’t even know if I had a son then. I’m also casting back into my own childhood, and framing sort of my son as me. A lot of what is happening, you know, you find stuff that interests you or intrigues you or compels you in your everyday walking around life, but who knows what shapes they will take on the page. There’s also the image – and I don’t know how I feel about it – of driving home and being caught in traffic. That probably happened the day before. And that’s not the strongest part of the poem, it may have been something that, had I worked on the poem a bit more, might have come out. It may also have been the trigger.

I think it’s important to always be willing to give up what generated the poem, but I don’t know that I always do that, and if I do, it’s because I’ve hit upon language that lets me step away. I think I even mention it in “Evening Dress”. That’s certainly one where I didn’t know where I was going. And the poem is pretty much language driven. All I have there is my love, and regard for my 12-year-old son, and I’m telling him something really rather adult, something he won’t really need, you know, at the time, for 10-years, 15-years. I didn’t know where that poem was going to go. In fact I still look back and wonder, “Did this wind up in the right place?”

DJ: Getting back to the education, how do you convey what you just said to a novice writer, or someone who’s in your class for the first time, whether a young writer or…

JM: The short answer is process. I tell them it takes me forever to finish a poem. And they may be touched by God and finish poems right away, but I doubt it. There may be a couple of people in the world that finish a poem right away. What I say is, if you are willing to draft your poems, you are willing to get better. And you’re willing to have confidence that you’re headed in the right direction. I think if you take a finished poem and compare it to the first draft – although I really have no interest in doing that – I think you’ll say, “My gosh. Look how far away I got from the trigger. And I didn’t know it.” Sometimes we get stuck thinking, “This poem has to turn.” Well, yeah, it will. If you spend time with it. Or it really wasn’t a poem in the first place. You just thought it was going to be a poem.

In order to step away from the trigger, be willing to spend time with the poem, simply by saying, “This draft today is probably not much better than tomorrow’s draft.” It’s a way of showing patience with the poem and letting it become what it wants to be.

DJ: I’d like to ask you about “Spinoza and the Morning”, and the difference between it and “My Neighbor’s Dog”, where you took these instances and moved them into a single episode so that it reads like one unfolding moment. In “Spinoza,” you take three distinct periods and bring them together in one scene just as fluidly. There’s the deathbed, there’s the college scene, there’s you and the coworker. Yet the poem remains contained, and distills into that beautiful line, “Faster than thought, light swept toward us.” In the midst of exploring and allowing any poem to go where it will go, do you ever come up for air all of the sudden and say, “Where the hell am I?”

JM: If I’m writing a 60-line poem, do I ever stop at line 35 and think, “My God, what’s going to happen?” Maybe, but I think my answer is No. I don’t stop on line 35. I go to line 60, and then I think, “Hmmm, I wonder what this poem’s about?” And that’s what I mean by it being a series of drafts. I may be wrong, but I worked on that poem a long time. It’s also a very important poem to me. I think there was a time when it was in three sections, which means there was a time before that when it was all one. Then I went to three sections. Then I realized it was too abrupt or discordant to go from section one to two, so I took those out again.

To think about, process wise, how that happened, I was probably saying, “My gosh, I have a poem with all these chunks in it. Maybe I ought to treat them like chunks.” When I chunked them, I probably developed those chunks more. Then I’m sure I went, “You know, it’s not moving. I need to take those chunks out.” Then I probably had a challenge for a while with, “How do I transition without beating somebody over the head or being prosaic?” You never know.

One reason why I kept at that poem was because it was important to me. It all is of the question, “How does morning begin?” Which is how I felt the very early morning, the middle of the morning, after my father-in-law passed away. I thought, “This night could go on forever. We’re not hungry. We’re not moving around. We don’t know what to do. It’s too early to get the body. We’re stuck.” It was my mother-in-law, my wife and myself. I thought, “How does morning come?” I probably had a couple more memories about seeing the sun come up in different places. It does happen, but in that moment I didn’t know how.

DJ: In that poem you took “father-in-law” and spelled it out in the more personal “father”.

JM: It got clunky to have all the relationships in there as they really were. And it didn’t really matter. In that moment, my father-in-law was my father. My mother-in-law was my mother. On the human level, that stuff doesn’t matter. Was I going to stick with, “my mother-in-law, my father-in-law”? I’m not going to stick to that. To what end? To be accurate? That wasn’t helpful.

DJ: And it’s not the meaning of the poem.

JM: It wasn’t helping me move. Fundamentally those are clunky. It might be an interesting challenge to write, with all those relationship titles in there. I had other things to do. I wanted to get onto the next poem.

John C. Morrison’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including the Seattle Review, the Cimarron Review, and Southern Poetry Review. Most recently, he directed the Writers in the Schools program for Literary Arts or Oregon, and currently teaches poetry at Washington State University, Vancouver. His first full-length collection of poems, Heaven of the Moment, is a finalist in the 2008 Oregon Book Awards for poetry, and three of the poems below (“Evening Dress,” “My Neighbor’s Dog,” and “Spinoza and the Morning”) are included in the collection.

Evening Dress

for my son

One day the sky will open,
promise, like there’s a zipper
invisible from our side. One

long zip from zenith,
where cirrus clouds curve
mare tail strands, down

to the horizon, green peaks
of distant spruce trees. What’s next?
What’s behind? No, it’s not

a giant pant fly, God’s prick
ready to douse our world, his infinite
love and patience at end. No.

Promise. The sleek zipper
belongs to the back of a long
dress. From sweet wisps at cool nape

down to dimple a tip of the tongue
above the buttocks. While everyone
goes about their day in cars,

on sidewalks, in dusty offices,
all beholden to a dull script,
you will see what to reach for

as the dress slips off into evening,
into darkness. Promise. Close your eyes,
draw her close, breathe stars.

My Neighbor’s Dog

Better for me had my neighbor died
before we began to drink out our nights
at a table stained with red wine:
his eyes, two tight circular syllogisms,
two eight balls rolled back black and white
into his head. The old philosopher
who named his dog Being. Capital B,
Being. His colleagues at every
university struggle with phantom
answers. Professor Tiederman dismisses
them as alchemists and names Being,
discovers Being becoming, Being,
which wasn’t and now is, Being
born in a litter of nine retrievers.

And the world, roundly, makes too much sense,
like looking in your rearview
after a long day at the end
of a long, straight street to see
slow traffic laid out behind you:
braided silver glinting wet
in the sunlight through clouds. You say
how wonderful to sit still beside
a black van pumping country rock
at an interminable stoplight
and then be here: woven in the bright braid,
and then be here. Being is like that,
halfway in my tipped garbage can
one minute; the next, shredding
in his bird-soft mouth my copy
of the daily Oregonian.

I’m home Sunday, ignoring my headache
from La Salles, ignoring the sticky smell
of Chianti in my sinuses, the smell
of Tiederman’s tedious chatter,
his illicit flurries while his wife,
sweet Janice, sits home warming her feet
under the belly of Being,

Being. Ignore it all because my son
shouldn’t see his old man drunk
or marred by wine. Better for him to play
street football unencumbered while I rake leaves
and the leavings of Being, lean
against the sweetgum and watch his team
huddle for a second down call.
Read the lips on my son, the light receiver,
he’s telling Tiederman’s boy Lewis,
that foul-mouthed shit, Throw it to me
on a fly pattern. Bent over at their hips,
the five study the line my son
draws on his dirty palm, a crisp line
up the gutter to the Hubner’s driveway.
The quarterback Lewis, always the arbiter
of cruel mediocrity, says
loudly enough for Being to hear
and howl out back, Fuck you. Everyone
goes short. Listen to him, son. Listen
hard. Listen to Being scratch at the fence gate.

Spinoza and the Morning

The surgeon knotted sutures one step
too slow to seal the net of vessels
oozing around his heart. Mother

rocked, framed by a window
shining on the penultimate hour.
Stunned, stuck like the late night

was clear pitch, I watched the dark
for sign of morning. Young, at school
I’d write for philosophy and push up

from the kitchen chair to step outside,
breathe, and see the strange stars
spun to us from the other hemisphere

and return with less time to Spinoza,
the lens grinder who taught relentless trust.
By morning when I packed my papers

in my bag and started toward campus,
I was drunk on exhaustion and his axiom
that we are God thinking. So let God learn regret.

A few years later at work, the other janitor
and I scrubbed floors, toilets, grime inside
light fixtures so close to sunrise, he insisted

we have the light find us facing west
and the great Sacramento Valley.
The streets were empty as we drove, reckless,

balancing large paper cups of dark beer
through the dim. We outlived our folly.
Spinoza wouldn’t survive the glass dust

that lacerated his lungs. Dad,
bloated by another four liters of saline,
another twenty pounds of pressure to give his heart

traction, ceased, and three of us, quiet
as dust in the room, struggled to remember
how day begins. Those years before

out of the car and up the rocky hill’s dirt path,
my friend and I turned to see
already it was bright morning across the river

in the towns of Fruto and Chrome. We stood
in the shadow of the Sierra
watching the wall of light careen our way,

emblazing pools of distant rice fields
and the deep green of almond orchards.
Faster than thought, light swept toward us,

claiming creek and stones, onto us
and over us, a wind from heaven to warm
our backs, lay our shadows in the grass.

Our Brother the Rain

More than ascribes to
more than holds to
more than maintains
the rain
the rain insists.
We go quiet
mortified
even ashamed for the rain
who pushes
pushes the point
that was never really in question
that was only ever a friendly call
for clarification
and we were all
more than completely clear
a cloudburst back
a silvery syllogism long ago
and at that moment
the rain had a point
well-made
well-put
a bon-mot
well-taken
and now a point long since
conceded
one the rain made first softly
deliberately but gently
then with increasing vigor
until we have no choice
but admit the mania
of our brother the rain
who will finish by weeping
our brother the rain
who blusters toward torrential
deaf to our deep hush.

Last Work

For my strain of cancer, after
surgery, radiation was perfunctory,
a mopping up of the most likely dead
and gone. Unless a car or some other great
stroke of dark luck took me,
I’d live through my youth to have
a few amber years to shuffle

on the sidewalk, an old man
in the luscious summer shade. But what
about the already elderly men around
the waiting room like around

a campfire, ringed by forest-green drapes,
the quiet eerie as the secret heart
of a temple? We would arrive
at the clinic in street clothes and emerge
from behind the cloth wall to join
the circle in a faded but sterile gown.

In conversation, they were
always onto a project, new circuitry
for the basement, laying a slab
of smooth concrete. Each man

had a bit better than 50/50
and in one sentence I’ll teach you
about both odds and faith:
Within a year half would rise
glorified, the rest would remain

on our planet with me but have
a clean garage, the mower slick-
oiled and blade-sharp, and be ready
for a lonely, languorous recovery.

A.K. “Mimi” Allin holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from City College of New York. She produces poetry, journals, questionnaires, visual poetry, text-art and poetry-driven performances for public spaces. She takes the name for her project, Nostalgia, from an Andrei Tarkovsky film [Nostaghia]. It refers to that universal place, that homeland we seek, that place we long to come home to, the human spirit, which is something the poet embodies. Allin is seeking a publisher for her manuscripts, Soviet Poems and Roof of Air. The following poems are featured here with Allin’s permission. All peculiarities of capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc. are by the poet’s design.

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
–Diane Arbus

and what do i know

images of the world
the ground &the sea
insistence &the resistance
what do i know
my surveillance never sensed
the camera blow
wasn’t even looking no
was focused on the channel
that battery of waves
those lies lives the motion of water
the notion of furor &foam
dominating the beach
that perverse idol work
jetty mine make me a jetty
of equal force &dimension
stour 4space
you don’t say
then you are the prisoner confiding
your face is the only document i need
with that i can hammer down walls
&ceilings rip up carpets &tacks
knock open the sills
mywrists ache4 labor
&myseeing &knowing
&truth &all that means
what do i know
inscriptions of war
philosophies of peace
lights &tunnels
hey you safe seeing suburbia
hey you stencil-a-boat
come on onthespot come
here lies the race
at the beachbreak
for the first time
you respond to the camera
that crashing wave
savoring the unchanging quality of you
like the fabrication of field &house
atop an aircraft hangar
like seeing what isn’t there
&not seeing what is
the cameras do things
like drop bombs &fly
&measure &attach windshields
&pick up &count dots on a die
oh luck &all those people
saying things in seats around you
clearing their throats in growls
like the curl of a surf thudding
some unseen beach

you are a moth&more&more

in all those museums
those miles
those cafés
the reemerging form
i throw myself in
the alley
&then
spillout on a backstreet
the next weeka new work
offers proof
of sunlight &prose
but prose i cannot do
i know that breaks a rulei want too mucha consort
i cannot dew a dropa schaft a ship
the well i’m instop cranking li
someone someday
will raise youwolves
i want to be your friend&
play footsies& thenthis is not good breeding romulus
become
becoming is all i ask

acurious collaborative combining

words wanting sentences
fragments wanting wholes
possibilities wanting meaning
progress is rapine now
the cubes are putting themselves back together
the grass has picked itself up
&put bits on bits
to make a meadow
there’s an augmentation going on
so press me further
ohplease do
it’s strange how our people path
how they bind &cleave
vanish somewhere
try not to bbinary
better to be tri
try &beyond

(previously published on The Argotist Online)

sin the sea wall

his sin, she saw,
given to the sea wall.
he, hers, clasped and blessed,
clasped and blessed.
some such, the sea saw.

he, her spool,
found strongly tall.
she did, his awl,
to unrest, draw.

the nip of her chin
tucked in
and nuzzled
the small of his back, this small,
as a chill wind
bristled her,
bristled her shawl.

when the waves rocked
causing her shawl to free,
all she, saw he,
but thought
her sins yet small,
yet grabbed for,
clasped for, blessed be.

his craving eyes
drained
and filled
with a vision, this lovely,
as the sea spray
wetted him,
wetted his cloak.

when the wild waves knocked,
causing his cloak to part,
his awl, she saw,
but thought the point yet dull,
yet clasped for, grasped for, blessed be.
there, within view of the wall,
the seas do rise and fall
in some such sumptuous way.

(previously published in the Crab Creek Review)

cabinetmaker

i want to make something
as beautiful as the table you are carving
or are planning to carve
i want to smooth something over time
to break the edges into worn soft light-attracting curves
i want to make something lasting and
as i wonder what
i come upon the thought
of you working with something
nature has already made beautiful
and see how you are just altering
a preexisting beauty
if only conceptually for the moment
shifting its focus
and i wish to do more than that
i wish to create
not tailor beauty
not to rework nature seam by seam
but to make the world perceive
and as i wonder how
i see you stop what you are doing
which stops me doing what i am doing
because as you tilt your head
and as your beard catches light
your chin goes into shadow
and i realize what it is that made you
that it is beauty you are working with
and i want to do something beautiful

MEHope lives in Klamath County, OR, with a husband, two teens, five cats, two dogs and a short list of contrary attitudes. She is MFA free and supports Obama for President.

Rock Chuck

Squeezed between rock and earth and root
marmots, (five months of fat
padding our bones) seep
into sleep like old secrets.

We dream of sun and shoot and bud
dream the hawk over other hills
dream eagles after geese; rolled in
each others armpits, noses cozy with fur.

Mole and vole and squirrel scoot
our periphery, using what heat we waste.
Their haste to bring winter’s end
doesn’t disturb; there’s four more

months to snooze. I roll into my neighbor,
scratch an ear, still in dream;
I will wake in spring a smaller shadow.

Near Wasco

Three paint horses
in the stubble field

disappear around
the canyon’s curve

new snow can’t mute
the crow’s call

the sky here holds
twice as many stars

as are seen through
the pines

so many, they seem to drown you.

Bruce Weigl is the author of fourteen poetry collections and a memoir, and his work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review and Harpers. Weigl has received awards from the American Academy of Poets, and has been the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, a Patterson Poetry Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2006, Weigl was awarded the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. His collection, Song of Napalm, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1988. He currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities at Lorain County Community College.

The following poems are from Weigl’s 2006 collection, Declension in the Village of Chung Luong, published by Ausable Press. They are featured here with the poet’s permission.

The Stakes as Hands

The stakes that the surveyors laid to mark the boundaries
of my land still stand above the drifted snow, as if someone
outstretched a hand to strangers who may pass my house.
Another war is waiting on the line to start; so many
we will send to die, and tonight
the snow is general all through the city:
an almost vast unfolding into tundras of our loneliness.
Yet it’s only snow. The stakes are stakes, not hands that reach
to strangers who may pass my house or not.

In Love with Easeful Death

That was just now a spirit;
a flicker and then gone
into the dusk of trees at the edge of the party
I can no longer bear witness to.
In the small pond with its faux waterfall and changing
colored lights,
I feed the imported fish into boredom.
That was surely a humming bird,
flit of color and then vanished into the trees.
I don’t ask anymore what’s real, and I told no one
about the absolutely white rabbit
I watched hop through my vision at the Shawmut T-stop
in Dorchester one midnight, I told no one,
but I caught myself wondering,
and then I stopped.

This No Where

This is just a picture we live inside,
white house, black shutters
frozen snow on the roof and on the ground.
This is just a movie we imagine is our lives, silent transfers
here and there in our cars, to appointments we must keep
or else die a little in someone’s estimation; die a little in
someone’s head. That’s what I think. That’s the way I think about it,
and I am only just a little afraid of letting go
completely of knowing anything,
letting go of knowing anything at all,
so I don’t know why
we fret so over the loss of beauty, over the passing, or over the death
of beauty, but we do. We try to possess beauty with our lying eyes
and think we know what beauty is or does, and it’s a crying shame
what happens to us then.

Portal

In our hallucination, the children are instructed
in the ways of finding shelter
when the rain of our bombs comes down
on their small villages and schools. The children
can identify our planes, and
what our planes can do to them. They

sleep the sleep of weary warriors
beaten down and left for nothing in their lonely deaths
that come so slowly you would wish
your own heart empty of blood.
I watched the people gather in the street
to stop the war that is the war against ourselves,
against the children who practice finding our planes
before they’re blown up into dust
nobody sees, but that
makes a sound like the vanquished.

The First Father-Murdered Rabbit

The smell of the rabbit’s blood in the back of my father’s
chevy from more than fifty years ago
comes back to me today,
out of a tunnel of some kind
is the best I can do
to explain what I mean. The smell of the rabbit’s blood
had been inside me all along; (I am most alive
inside of words, and most safe in their aisle of fancy.)
That boy didn’t have to see the rabbit, pearl of blood
at the tip of its nose,
but he did, and he didn’t have to help skin the rabbit clean,
but he did that too, at his father’s side.
You don’t know at the time
just what it is that you’re getting yourself into;
just what doors
you may open, and then never come back.

Jack Lorts is a retired educator, living in small town eastern Oregon, and a poet publishing in little mags as well as a recent chapbook, The Daughter Poems & Others, by Pudding House Press.

The party at Ralph’s
was the party at Ralph’s
(he was in Europe, Bora Bora
or some such on a Fullbright).
Everyone from the Project was there.
Bobbi, who was house-sitting for Ralph,
said     What the hell

Come on over     If Ralph were here
he’d ask you
(he’s in Tibet or Tahiti
on a Guggenheim or some such).

A barrel of cheap wine was passed
cold pizza
and the usual solutions
to the world’s problems.
Vince, Herb and I
    watched the game on TV.

The party at Ralph’s
was the party at Ralph’s.
Thanks, Ralph,
wherever you are!

Brian Hardie is a 24-year-old writer from Portland. He’s been writing poetry since the age of seven, and has been published in a number of small press journals including The Pebble Lake Review (Austin, TX), Conceit Magazine (San Fransisco, CA) and Angel Exhaust (UK). He has also toured the West Coast and Midwest as a musician. He’s currently in the process of writing a book of abstract poetry.

Instead of being text book romantic,
I level the basis of nervous
Contentment, walking a thin
Line synopsis of the Tragic
War between detectives and
Thieves singing
Belches in a new drug scene
Fabricated from the wild
Horse sedative, wallowing
In the dusty mind storms,
stinging the skin. Homicide
Drama begins her song with
A drumbeat.
Bullets and rays
Shot behind strung out eyes
Praise and break bread with all
But the Addictions killer. Sober
Senseless hidden views of Washington
Equally stabilize the loss, lingering as
That possible romantic overdose subsides.

Peter Sears was born in New York, grew up in the East, graduated from Yale and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He won the 1999 Pergrine Smith Poetry Competition for his book of poems,The Brink. His first book-length collection, Tour,was published in 1987. He has published multiple chapbooks of poetry and two teaching books, Secret Writing and Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem. His work has been published in many magazines and literary journals and widely anthologized. “Long After I Am Gone” appears in his most recent chapbook, Luge, and is published here with the author’s permission.

Some day my daughter will make a left turn,
long after I am gone, and think of me,
not because she sees something in particular;

no, and not because of an odd overlap like
a rowboat crossing the path of lake moonlight,
but because I just rise in her memory like toast;

yes, she and I in a laundromat, feeding tumbles
of quarters into the dryers’ silver mouths
to make all five dryers spin long enough

to get ornery blue jeans dry as crackers.
“Do you see yourself there in the laundromat?”
“Yes, dad, I’m running from dryer to dryer,

sticking in quarters kerplunk kerplunk,
but I guess I’ll go back to putting stickers
on my school notebook because this is taking

a lot longer, dad, than you said it would.”
This recalling what you said helps me now
against each day falling faster and faster away.

Isai Jaimes is an experimentalist poet, born in Trinidad and raised in Venezuela, England, and the USA. His passion for art comes from a hero complex that overwhelms his nature. He is currently working on an opera libretto based on the Echo and Narcissus myth as told by Ovid, and his first book of poetry, Apollo 21c, is in the waiting room for publishing.

In the room

He’s suspended flat against a top corner.

The walls line together in pyramid between his eyes.

Two inches below the nostrils:

His tongue sticks out

like a red balloon flapping for its life.

Above his head,

Ears pulled up most,

A big exclamation point

Stretches halfway across the ceiling

And seeing a flame let go off a candle:

‘How curious, does Living jump off its wick

And in smoke cheer pirouette so?’